I'm a technology, privacy, and information security reporter and most recently the author of the book This Machine Kills Secrets, a chronicle of the history and future of information leaks, from the Pentagon Papers to WikiLeaks and beyond.
I've covered the hacker beat for Forbes since 2007, with frequent detours into digital miscellania like switches, servers, supercomputers, search, e-books, online censorship, robots, and China. My favorite stories are the ones where non-fiction resembles science fiction. My favorite sources usually have the word "research" in their titles.
Since I joined Forbes, this job has taken me from an autonomous car race in the California desert all the way to Beijing, where I wrote the first English-language cover story on the Chinese search billionaire Robin Li for Forbes Asia. Black hats, white hats, cyborgs, cyberspies, idiot savants and even CEOs are welcome to email me at agreenberg (at) forbes.com. My PGP public key can be found here.

On Wednesday morning, Silk Road 2.0 came online, promising a new and slightly improved version of the anonymous black market for drugs and other contraband that the Department of Justice shut down just over a month before. Like the old Silk Road, which until its closure served as the Web’s most popular bazaar for anonymous narcotics sales, the new site uses the anonymity tool Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to protect the identity of its users. As of Wednesday morning, it already sported close to 500 drug listings, ranging from marijuana to ecstasy to cocaine. It’s even being administered by a new manager using the handle the Dread Pirate Roberts, the same pseudonym adopted by the previous owner and manager of the Silk Road, allegedly the 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht arrested by the FBI in San Francisco on October 2nd.

The new Silk Road’s login page, poking fun at the Department of Justice’s seizure notice posted to the original Silk Road.

The only significant visible change from the last Silk Road, spotted by the dark-web-focused site AllThingsVice that first published the site’s new url, is a new security feature that allows users to use their PGP encryption key as an extra authentication measure. It also has a new login page, parodying the seizure notice posted by the Department of Justice on the prior Silk Road’s homepage, with the notice “This Hidden Site Has Been Seized” replaced by the sentence “This Hidden Site Has Risen Again.”

The Silk Road sequel experienced some hiccups coming online–it had planned to launch at 4:20pm on November 5th, a significant time and date for an anarchic drug site. But that launch was delayed for 24 hours, and even now the new Silk Road 2.0 isn’t fully operational–its administrators say they’re still gauging the site’s traffic load before they start accepting orders later this week.

A third site, the older Silk Road competitor Black Market Reloaded, also experienced a temporary crisis earlier in October when an administrator leaked the site’s source code onto the web. Black Market Reloaded’s owner known as Backopy initially said he would shut down the site as a result, but then changed his mind when the leak turned out not to expose any obvious vulnerabilities endangering user privacy.

“I for one do not trust the new [Silk Road],” wrote one user on the site’s forums. “I just get an eerie feeling from the whole idea of it, right now i will steer clear…only time will tell, i want to dive head first into it, but i want to see it play out for a little bit before i slap down another 500 bucks, an investment i made the day before [Silk Road] was closed.”

Many more of Silk Road’s users seem reassured, however, by the fact that Silk Road 2.0 is being managed in part by known administrators from the original Silk Road, particularly a moderator known as Libertas who has served as one of the more vocal leaders of the Silk Road community since Ulbricht, the alleged Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested.

“Silk Road 2.0 will be reborn better, much much more secure as testament to the tenacity and determination of this wonderful community of ours,” wrote one moderator on the new Silk Road’s forum site with the name Synergy. “We will not be down trodden, we will rise again.”

“Into the breach once more my friends!” wrote one Silk Road vendor on the site known as PerfectScans.

Another user with the handle Steve Jobs took the opportunity to offer a eulogy for 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht, the accused previous Dread Pirate Roberts and owner of the original Silk Road, who was arrested last month and has been extradited from Glen Dyer prison in Oakland, California to a jail in New York where he’s scheduled to have a bail hearing this week.

“Within the excitement and morning light glare of a brand new day for all of us…say a kind prayer for Last DPR,” Steve Jobs writes. “Forsaken, fading, atrophying alone in a concrete box cell… who brought us all together here and gave me a home, now he has none.”

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I am shocked that they did not name it Honeypot. Do you think giving users the ability to use their own PGP encryption key for authentication enhances the security of the site or more clearly ties individuals using it to the site?

It could go both ways. For one, because of the PGP keys it’s harder for it to be a honey pot, assuming users are generating their own PGP keys and keeping the private key to themselves. In such a scheme people would advertise their public key (on the site), the site could help them send messages to other people. But decoding and verifying the message would require a third party application to be used (so that the site does not get the private key). However the benefits of such a scheme are quite nice: No one on the site could read private messages besides the intended recipient; The recipient could verify the sender; Hence you don’t actually have to trust the site, assuming people can verify their keys through a third party (like torchat).

This doesn’t pose much of a threat of tying users to the site assuming it’s users take the proper precautions. For starters they should use an operating systems like TAILs to prevent the operating system from storing information. Then they need to store the key in a secure way. The best way would be to remember it (it’s only about 80 English words (13 bits per word, 1024 bit key). I’ve remembered less, word perfect, in a week of practice). Short of that, a very secure RSA key (4096 bits) is small enough to be hidden using stenography (and still encrypted of course), or be hidden in a True Crypt deniable partition without being obvious. Both of these methods assume you use encryption for everyday tasks. If you have a terabyte of encrypted data (say custom re-encoded pirated movies, not criminal unless you are selling them) and you hide 4096 bits somewhere in it… good luck to anybody trying to find that.

Okay, I found the Forbes Thought Of The Day silly: “ Civilization is the progress of a society towards privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men. “— Ayn Rand

… but really, I am extremely biased because I think the majority of Ayn Rand is silly… But then I looked at it in the context of this post on the silk road… and, in essence, she is right. The progress of the Silk Road is essentially doing exactly what her definition of civilization says it is..progressing the savage towards privacy..setting men free from men…. complete anonymity

you may enjoy this, although, I am not sure if it is directly relevant.

my co-worker’s mother-in-law makes $60 an hour on the computer. She has been laid off for ten months but last month her check was $16214 just working on the computer for a few hours. go right here……….. http://x.co/2lFr3

Anyone who is stupid enough to register for that new site deserves what’s coming.. that smells like a sting for sure =)

The feds take down the old site and arrest the owner, the new site crops up a short while after ready for new people to register to trade illegal items.. As Kashmir said, I’m surprised they didn’t name it Honeypot..

I am not surprised that a “new” site has popped up. What is kind of interesting is that anyone associated with the old site is using the same user name on the new site. This “Libertas” is either the dumbest fellow on the block or it is really not him. I mean he is painting a red bulls-eye on his digital chest. They are going to make a special effort to find all of his posting, connections etc, just like was apparently done with DPR. The only difference is law enforcement has the added benefit of the Silk Road’s computers/servers they seized earlier, which they can start looking for references to him, for clues that can ID him. Additionally, they have someone in custody, who might be willing to shave some time of the lengthy sentence (if convicted) to start talking. Kashmir’s observation that they should have named it “honeypot” is on point. Those encryption keys will be used to tie any suspects they catch to the crime even if this isn’t a sting. Wake up fellows, the law has come to the digital wild west! Obviously, they have a lot of work to do but it is a start.

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